rockcritics daily (phase 1)

LINKS UPDATE & REVAMP

Some new links added next door. Also, I broke some of it down into further sub-genres. I hope to find more movie blogs and worthwhile sites for that section. Ditto for the new quick-list of mp3 blogs, hardly any of which I've even had time to investigate. After I've done so, I'll try to add some short descriptions; it's just a bunch of titles at the moment. (Still trying to revive my own ambitions in this game, too, which is to say, I think about it lots...anyone got any ideas about how--more specifically, where--to do this sort of thing on the cheap? Like, a few bucks a month kind of deal? Oh, and technically simple on top of that?)

P.S. If your blog or site's in there but not (in your view) properly placed, let me know. And if you know of any essentials I'm missing (incl. your own), let me know that too.

THE MIX-TAPE APPROACH

Disco Dreams: Luc Sante reviews Geoffrey O'Brien's Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, and Nick Hornby's Songbook in the New York Review of Books.

Sample: "Both of the books under review are mix tapes, or rather they are track listings with commentary....As a way of writing about popular music that admits the intense subjectivity and chance associations that define the topic no matter how much intellectual ballast is brought to bear, the mix-tape approach is an honest one. The mix tape, after all, is the fruit of contingency; it has no truck with canon-building. And while such a book is at first glance pretty easy to put together, or at least not much harder than compiling the tape, since any fool can go on at length about the circumstances under which he or she first heard 'Ebb Tide' or 'Bring the Noise,' it is vexingly tough to shape. If the mix tape itself is by nature a transient object, the book is, as it were, a permanent record."

CHEERFUL THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

"Good News for Music Writers: Poets Die First."

Well, that's the spin the Music Press Report mailing list puts on this story.

The Music Press Report is described as "a weekly must-read newsletter that will provide you with the latest in music press news, articles and resources." You can sign up via MusicJournalist.com. I'll no doubt be cribbing lots of stuff from it.

CAN'T SEE THE KARAOKE FOR THE CRITICS

If you've been reading with interest some of the EMP-related stuff lately, I probably don't need to point out that jane dark's sugarhigh! has been generously posting several of the "critical karaoke" performances--the latest is Franklin Bruno's. These are worth checking out if you haven't, and I assume there are still more to come.

But while I do enjoy reading these, I have to say, I don't really get what's so "karaoke" about all of this. Critics reading prepared-in-advance thoughts (reviews, speeches) about songs they love (or have loved) over top of the songs themselves--hmm. I mean, it seems like all you'll derive from these "performances" that you won't get from just reading them on the page is the sound of the critic's voice and possibly some compelling interplay in sections between the speaker and the music--cool (and as I haven't actually heard any of these, maybe I don't know what I'm missing).

Wouldn't it be more truly karaoke-like, though, to have participants speak over songs which they couldn't prepare in advance for? A song which they would either choose from a list (prepared by the conference organizers) or pull out of a hat just prior to the event? Or which another participant would choose for them? (This could be an "and" rather than an "instead of" suggestion--and I'm not concerned with logisitics here, just shooting out ideas--with each participant doing two performances, one they've prepared, and one that's forced on them.) These are critics after all--they're smart people, right? And anyway, isn't the possibility of flubbing or making an ass of yourself one of the underlying premises of karaoke?

NEW BLOGS, NEW SITES

Must update links page soon. Next round will include:

HER NAME'S BARBARA

Come fly with her. On Air America Radio. When you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than no one Noam known.

[In other words, Flaskaland takes to the airwaves.]

IS THIS THING ON?

Greil Marcus's EMP Karaoke performance is here (via sugarhigh).

EMP CONFERENCE REPORT FROM J.D. CONSIDINE

[J.D. Considine kindly answers a few e-mail questions about this year's EMP Conference.]

Scott --

Perhaps the first thing that needs be understood about the EMP confab is that it's NOT a "rock critic conference." Although there were a lot of rock crits on hand, there were even more academics (and a fair number who were both). Anyone expecting to find conference rooms crowded with staffers from Rolling Stone, Vibe, Blender, Spin and XXL would have been profoundly disappointed. But that's part of what makes the conference so worthwhile. It's not about charts or personalities or "the biz," but ways of looking at and listening to music--and as such full of thought-provoking ideas, some of which get presented as papers, others which tumble out of impromptu conversations.

With that in mind, let's look at your questions:

>>>Which presentation or discussion did you like best? And what (if any) good or new ideas or interests did you come away with?

"Liked Best" is a bit tricky, because there were some presentations that were both great fun but not particularly of great import. Douglas Wolk's More Jersey Than Mersey, which surveyed the ranks of ersatz Beatle bands tossed into the marketplace in hopes of cashing in on Beatlemania (and confused consumers) was essentially examining a footnote in rock history. But he did it beautifully, offering not only a droll catalog of pop inanities, but actually providing some of the back story (as well as some hysterical examples). Then there was Brian Goedde's Classical Music Puts Me to Sleep, which in many ways pissed me off (it said nothing while affecting smug profundity) but was nonetheless very cleverly conceived and executed. Did I like it? I'm not sure, really--but I'm very glad I saw it.

So how about I just list what I learned the most from? Tops there would be Ghetto Brothers Power: Gangs, Guitars and the aguinaldo, in which the pre-history of hip-hop--we're talking 1964 to 1971 here--was illuminated through the story of Benji Melendez, founder of the South Bronx gang the Ghetto Brothers. Major story-behind-the-story stuff here; I can't wait to see moderator Jeff Chang's upcoming book on hip-hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop.

Other killer presentations included Robert Fink's The Story of ORCH5, which started with the orchestral sample that kicks off "Planet Rock," and explained its story while somehow working out a relationship between Kraftwerk and Schubert; Ted Anthony's beautifully-presented exposition of "House of the Rising Sun"; and Mark Anthony Neal's tribute to Teena Marie in White Chocolate Soul. There was also some beautiful writing in Devin McKinney's The Mechanics and Mysteries of the Pop Moment (despite some caveats about his treatment of Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'"), as well as in a couple Critical Karaoke numbers.

But the single best moment--for me, anyway--was listening to Jason King describing how he puzzled out some of Timbaland's beats not by hard thinking but by dancing. Treating music as energy and looking at how it makes us move seems dead simple as an idea, but how many writers bother to take that tack? Lots of food for thought there.

>>>Does the conference in your mind succeed at what it's trying to do?

Absolutely--if only because it generates a sort of community where one would normally not exist.

>>>How did the whole thing compare to previous years?

I can only compare it to last year, and thought it was better--mainly because there was less "let me read you what I wrote" and more attention paid to ways in which the ideas could be animated and presented. Although the Ego Trip presentation last year was a stunner....

>>>How did your own presentation go? Were you pleased with the reception?

Well, my paper--Lost in Translation? Morning Musume's "Love Machine" and the Triumph of Karaoke Culture--was obscure even by conference standards (an exposition of a 1999 J-Pop single nobody on this side of the Pacific ever heard?), so I wasn't expecting much of a crowd. But the multi-media parts went well, and people were inexplicably entertained. So things went much better than expected.

>>>Who goes to this conference, aside from the critics presenting (and their friends)?

This was much discussed, and because many people there wore several hats--is Greil Marcus an academic or a journo?--it's hard to say precisely who was what. But I'd say most of the people there had at least some attachment to academia. As for non-presenters, some were from the Seattle area, and a number were grad students. As for rock critics, do any of us have friends? (Joke!)

>>>Is there a lot of extracurricular "socializing" at this event?

Yes. I almost wish the conference had been longer, so there could have been more. Either that, or that I hadn't had such an early flight out Sunday...

Thanks, J.D. Next year I'll remember to ask about clothes and drugs, too (how could I have forgotten?).


More conference thoughts from: Caryn Brooks, Jane Dark, Michaelangelo Matos, Oliver Wang, Douglas Wolk.

BLACK ROCK PROHIBITION

More Than Words: Musings on Music Journalism.
Black Like Me

By Devon Powers in PopMatters.

"Case in point: the way people talk about TV on the Radio dances not-so-subtly around these issues. Either Tunde Adebimpe's voice is full of 'soul' (a word often not applied to rock in any form), or they're written off as being 'soulless'--again, not a problem for band's whose melanin doesn't suggest that they should have any soul."

["Soul" as anything other than a straightforward genre tag is generally a term to avoid. "Soulful" in particular is such a bullshit word--really, what does it mean?]

EMP QUERY

I fully expect that within the next few days there'll be whole lotta bloggin' goin' on about the Seattle conference that took place this weekend, and I'll link to as much chatter as I can (my own blogging is now limited to evenings and weekends, at least for the time being). If anyone else reading this was there, either as a participant or as a visitor, and has something they'd like to say about it--impressions, gossip, what was good, what wasn't, etc.--I'd be happy to post comments here. (I send this out fully expecting to not get any takers, but I figure it's worth a try.)

NEW RADIO BLOG ALERT

This is radio weisblogg (but are the 'pirates' alive?).

Marc Weisblott blogs critically on: "AM/FM/etc.: mass media, free speech, enormous egos, hit music and more..."

BLOG ALERT

MichaelDeeds.com

"This site contains articles by Michael Deeds, including highlights from the Washington Post, the Idaho Statesman and other freelance work."

[This piece on "cookie monster vocals" in metal looks interesting.]

ROCKWELL ON ELITISM AND CRITICS

Corporate Culture Clash: Elitism, Popularity and Rock 'n' Roll

By John Rockwell

"When I was the chief rock critic of the New York Times in the 1970s, I used to say that rock critics were the most extreme elitists I knew. I meant it as a compliment, up to a point..."

[Registration required.]

DON'T SCREW UP YOUR DAY JOB

(Not likely any more blog posts here during business hours; web spies at work in full effect.)

DEMOCRACY'S NOT BUNK!

In case you hadn't heard, Simon Reynolds has a post-punk epic hitting the shelves sometime in....er, don't know when, exactly, but presumably-hopefully soon. To title his book, he posed a contest on his blog. The results are entertaining (and oh-so-angular).

MORE MUSIC-MOVIE STUFF

When I stumbled upon the Music Movies link below from the Rock and Roll Report, I failed to click through on one of his sources; it seems there's a whole discussion and/or poll about this at Gothamist.

NEW BOOK ALERT

Haven't read this, haven't even seen it, but look forward to checking it out:

Tim Lawrence's Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979.


Some reviews and etc:

MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC

The Ten Best Films About Music.
By Jeremy Drysdale, screenwriter (from the Independent).

"You probably remember it as one of the funniest movies you've ever seen..." (The Blues Brothers?!)

via The Rock and Roll Report.

SEATTLE AS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

No, no, no, not another story about that guy from Mother Love Bone. It's EMP's Pop Music Studies Conference.

The proceedings kick off in the Seattle Weekly with a special edition of Jukebox Jury, in which music editor Michaelangelo Matos plays DJ for conference organizers, Ann Powers and Eric Weisbard. With a neat twist in the song selections, and some good Greil stories to boot.

Quote: "Let’s just be honest about it...We care a lot more about music writing than music, if push comes to shove."

SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

(More off-topic stuff. But hang tight, there'll almost certainly be more stories ahead with such scintillating topics as "What is the Mandatory Retirement Age for People Writing About Pop Music?" and "Has Rock Criticism Lost its Edge?" and "Will It Ever Come Back?")

First thought when I turned to this column in the New York Observer today: Is George Bush mutating into Noam Chomsky?

THE ONION USED TO SET GOOD EXAMPLE TO HELP STOP PROMOTION OF GAY AGENDA IN SCHOOLS

I suppose I'm (to relay the kind of business parlance I'm subjected to all day) "out of scope" with this one, but it's too good to resist, and anyway, I was born and grew up in London, ON, the plaza-on-every-street-corner capital of the universe where this occured.

Trustee seeks apology for spoof photo.

By Marissa Nelson, London Free Press.

"The photo shows a teacher at the front of a class with explicit sexual images and terms drawn on the board and is supposed to represent one of the 'countless' classrooms where homosexuality is promoted.

"The picture was copied from the Onion, a satirical newspaper from the United States. The headline of the 1998 story says, ' '98 homosexual drive nearing goal.'"

Too many quotable lines here. But has there ever been a worse acronym for a "concerned citizens" group than STOP? Simply Truths Our Priority--does that even make sense?

THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME...

I plug the rockcritics sounds page which I'm rather unreasonably and pathetically proud of! (Hey, I'm a Wedding DJ--bringing the noise is one of my occupations.) The link for this will remain on the sidebar, and I will do my best to post new samples every few days, though I'll stop waving my arms around and telling you about it. Note: this is not a page for downloading songs, despite my previous intentions. It's really a space for me to just put some cool audio filler, stuff worth no more than a single listen, usually, but hopefully worth at least that. Curios, basically.

MALFUNCTION?

I've received three e-mails in the last week from people claiming they can't access this site. I'm thinking it might be because I went a little crazy with the graphics--hence, my removal of some of the jpegs on those earlier posts. Hopefully that has helped, though I suppose if it hasn't I'll never know, and neither will they.

MUSIC FOR THOUGHT

Chapter & Verse: A Journal of Popular Music and Literature Studies.

Described as "a new web journal that explores the creative intersection between popular music and the written word--novels and short stories, plays and poetry, journalism and criticism."

Edited by Simon Warner, hosted at Popmatters, and featuring Simon Frith!

BOB MOULD'S "TWO SMALL WORDS"

I was alerted through the Yahoo Girl Groups list to this recent blog post by Bob Mould:

"Thursday night, as usual, Green Lantern. A packed house, Spring is here, the men are out, and I have to ask, why in the hell are there always a couple of guys who think it's really really cute to bring their 'fag hags' with them? Boys, it's a bummer, OK? Does that make me a misogynist? I have no interest in going into the Womens' locker room, I love women and all that, but please...one hour a week, can you not meet them later at another bar? Sorry, girls, just had to say it. Don't hate me for it."

Which inspired this response from Caryn Brooks:

"Yes, in fact, it does make you a misogynist. Quite disappointing. I guess it was fine when all the 'fag hags' were nursing their gay friends with AIDS, but that was so, like, 1985. Who needs those pesky girls around now, anyway? I mean, they, like smell and everything. Yeah, those guys think it's real cute to bring their female friends...as if they are really interested in talking to them or anything."

Then Mould's rather condescending response to that (hmm, how about "I Apologize" or "Sorry Somehow"?!), and then more on both sites, though presumably it's Bob's show from here on in. He claims to have received "so much mail," though insists that "understanding is overwhelming offended, by a large margin," which, I guess we have to assume is true as he's only (thus far) printed two letters (why not print them all?).

(In the meantime, I'm glad to have discovered Caryn's blog, which I was unaware of.)

MORE SOUNDS TO LISTEN TO

I'm not sure how long I'll have access to the rockcritics main server--the main site may be moving, it may all end up on a blog, it's a bit up in the air right now--but while I do, I'll continue to post the odd music sample (it's my fun new thing to look forward to). I posted a new one--or rather, an old one. A bootleg (in the original sense of the word) called "Exile on Main St. Blues"--an actual promo track recorded by Jagger to tout the Exile album. Or something--I've no idea of the track's origins, but it's very interesting if you're a Stones fan. Check it out (before the cops get here).

BRAZILIAN MUSIC BLOG

I have some updates to do on the blogs page soon, in the meantime, here's an interesting new one:

Allison Bojarski's the brazilian muse.
Providing your daily dose of all things Brazilian...in New York City. ("Everything from samba to forro to MPB [musica popular brasileira] to Brazilian rock.")

LARRY NAGER VS. CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, PART 3 or 4

Newspaper Rock Critics Face the Music on Ageism

By Shawn Moynihan in Editor & Publisher, via Romenesko.

(Sidebar Question: When should aging, jaded bloggers throw in the towel? Is there a retirement fund at the end of all this?)

DYLAN'S UNDERWEAR AD

Tangled Up in Boobs: What's Bob Dylan doing in a Victoria's Secret ad?
By Seth Stevenson in Slate.

Pretty good puzzled-reaction piece about the commercial (which I still haven't seen; the one I did catch was 15 seconds long and showed his CD at the end). Still, I think the only thing riskier than ascribing any particular motives to what Dylan does is to ascribe the motive "needs the exposure." That just doesn't seem plausible, but really, who knows?

(Also, I think there needs to be a contest for the Corniest Dylan Bra Commercial Headline. "Tangled Up in Boobs" is almost too good. The worst I've seen yet is "Hey, Mr. Lingerie Man"!)

CORRECTION

Sorry, it's Kill Your Idols, not Kill Yr. Idols. I've got those canon-smashers Sonic Youth on the brain.

DEBUNKING THE CLASSICS

There's a column in a British magazine, I think it might be Uncut, by someone (or more likely some they) dubbed the 'Grim Reaper' (I haven't flipped through any glossy British music mags in over a year, so for all I know the column might have vanished). Essentially, the premise is this: this so-called Grim Reaper takes a canonized album or movie and sets out to debunk its vaunted reputation by tearing it apart, limb by limb. A measure of just how good that column is isn't so much its failure to make me reconsider any of the esteemed artifacts up for slaughter so much as the fact that I can't even recall for certain which esteemed artifacts it put up for slaughter--Pet Sounds and probably something by Bruce Springsteen vaguely ring a bell. In a word, lame.

I'll hold off on any such pronouncements until I actually read some of Kill Yr. Idols, a new collection of essays edited by Jim Derogatis and Carmél Carrillo, but I'm not overly excited by the premise: "thirty-four essays in which each writer addresses an allegedly 'great' album that he or she despises." This, unsurprisingly, includes Sgt. Pepper, which, despite its apparently permanent place at or near the top of the canon (maybe it's worth asking whose canon?), has also been slammed or dismissed on an almost regular basis. Richard Goldstein panned the album in the New York Times in the summer of '67 for God's sake; even Greil Marcus, in his loving essay on the Beatles in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, has less than kind words for the record, beyond its unimpeachable status as an "event." Me, I don't know anyone who considers it one of the three best Beatles albums, not that I've ever bothered to take an official poll. In other words, WHO CARES? If Rolling Stone magazine (and really, let's be fair--Jann Wenner) wants to continually shove SP down our throats as the "greatest album of yada yada" then do as I and plenty of other reasonable people do and just stop reading Rolling Stone! (Or skip that page, at least.)

My own reading into DeRogatis (don't try this at home, kids) is that he's so completely obsessed with Rolling Stone magazine that he just can't cleanse himself of their (admittedly rotting) stench. (They fired him, you know, for panning an album by the Hooters--or maybe it was Phish--which of course he never tires of mentioning at every available opportunity.) A few paragraphs after bringing this up for the 2,037th time, Jim writes: "I’ll confess that in the midst of editing this collection, I had a brief crisis of conscience when I wondered if this book was too much of a childish exercise--the rock-critic equivalent of the bratty kid wiping his snot on the blackboard in feeble protestation of the injustices of third-grade life--but that very day, Rolling Stone No. 937 arrived, a 'Special Collectors Issue' all-knowingly titled 'The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,' and Kill Your Idols once again seemed not only valid, but absolutely necessary." But necessary to whom? To all those poor young consumers who are lining up like robots to purchase (er, download for free) albums which they probably should have in their collections anyway, because some old magazine that gets kicked around by virtually any critic who isn't paid to write for them told them to?? Seriously, who out there is still buying Rolling Stone's official version of what constitutes "the greatest" anyway? Or Spin's? Or VH1's? (Admittedly, I lead a sheltered life.)

I could quibble about various other points (for starters, what the editors consider "classics"), but I haven't even seen the book yet, and I'll assume that there are at least a few entertaining, possibly even enlightening, essays in there--I'll give Kill Yr. Idols the benefit of the doubt in that regard. But if I'm ever going to read anything about Sgt. Pepper or Pet Sounds or Exile on Main St. again, it better be startlingly original or weird or insightful; whether or not the reviewer loves it or hates it is almost beside the point.

(For a more in-depth invective, go read Nate Patrin's "Unjustifiable Homicide.")

THIS IS A TEST

I'm not sure if this will work...a friend of mine (the mysterious "DJ Shoe") e-mailed me an mp3 "promo mashup" he made and asked me if I would disseminate it on rockcritics. I didn't think I was capable of doing that sort of thing, but it ended up being easier than I thought, and from home anyway it seems to work properly (I assume you need the right kind of mp3 player to hear this???). Anyway, if someone/anyone out there can tell me if this actually works from their end, that'd be great. (DJ Shoe welcomes any comments too!)

Click here to listen.

I'll probably remove this in a day or two, but if it does work properly, I may use the server space to to upload the odd song or soundbite now and again--what the hell, everyone else is doing it.

RICHARD RIEGEL WRITES:

Glad to see the rockcritics daily blog continuing its long march through the wilds of the consumer village. I think it's great that you've been writing about movies and film criticism lately, if that's what interests you at the moment. Believe me, all your work in maintaining rockcritics.com is appreciated by those of us out here in the hinterlands.

Speaking of which, I'd told you before that Tracks mag has a solid Cincinnati connection, and today's Cincinnati Enquirer ran stories on the 'nati natives behind it, financial backer Frank "Bo" Wood and editor Alan Light. See here and here.

Both of these guys represent Elderly Money as far as Cincinnati goes. As noted, Light's a graduate of Cincinnati Country Day, an exclusive prep school, and Yale U., while Bo Wood graduated from Walnut Hills, Cincinnati's top academic public high school (also the alma mater of Jerry Rubin, Teresa Isaac, and Sarah Riegel, so there's some hope there), but the Wood family has always seemed to me to be the Queen City's version of the Martha's Vineyard Taylors, with Bo the Sweet Baby James equivalent--he even looks something like that whelp Lester Bangs marked for death in his seminal early essay. Add the fact that Tracks has hired Anthony DeCurtis, who's made a whole career out of flattering up to the wealthy & powerful, and it looks like a privileged-white-male hen party to me--but then, I've only "lived" in Cincinnati lo these 35 years.

If I were an old guy (and I sure am!) intent on keeping up with the music scene, I'd read Harp instead. Wait a minute--I write for Harp! Am I allowed to plug it here?!?!?

Richard the R.

FILMOGRAPHY COMPANION TO THE DREAM LIFE

I'm close to finishing the aforementioned Hoberman book (dozens of people have e-mailed wondering about my progress in this area) and because my previous post about it was vague in so many ways, I figured the least I could do was provide something of a companion viewing guide: a list of many of the key movies the author writes about, with a few choice quotes and anecdotes, from Hoberman and others, scattered about. (Note: if a quote isn't attributed, assume it's directly from The Dream Life.) This is as much for my benefit as anyone else's; I plan to rent a bunch of these over the next couple months, and without my library copy of the book to consult, I almost certainly won't remember some of the films in the text.

ITEM NUMBER 3716059964

"Rock Critic" Pet Rock--Original Akron Rocks. Starting bid is $4.99.

"'Rock Critic' can survive a hard rock lifestyle much better than most other pets. You can forget about him for weeks, drop him down the steps, or even run over him with your car. He will survive most anything a rocker will dish out."

Oh, and, uh, this.

[I'm not related to these potato people....just so you know.]

THURSTON, AXL, AND ME (THE CRUCIFIXION OF GUNS 'N ROSES)

When the Edge Moved to the Middle.

By Thurston Moore in the New York Times

Yeah, I know, I wouldn't give this a second thought minus the byline, but it's interesting primarily for two points:
1) Labelling Guns 'N Roses "hair-metal." (Cheeky!)
2) The phrase "Disney-damaged pop idols," which puts a glorious new spin on the (cringe-worthy) "damaged" cliche, so cool. (I can hear Simon Cowell already: "It all sounds a bit Disney-damaged to my ears, sorry.")

LINKED FROM ROMENESKO

RIMSHOT: Life in the Hustings. (Commentary in STLtoday.com.)

"Now comes The New Yorker, with its vaunted fact-checkers asleep at the wheel, to say St. Louis is to rap what Nashville is to country and Motown is to, well, Motown. Sweet of them to notice, though, out here on the prairie."

(I don't know the context here, i.e., what piece in the New Yorker they're referring to.)

JUKEBOX OF THE MIND

I'd still like to explicate at some point about Mark Coleman's Playback: From the Victrola to Mp3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money, which I noted here a couple months ago, then got too busy to think--or write--about properly (oh, and just in case you're wondering, I scrapped that "rockcritics books" page I started around that time because the idea that I would keep up with it along with all my other silly projects was clearly a delusion). In brief, Playback is worth recommending, though more as an historical overview of musical machinery than as an in-depth analysis of it. It's not easy to relay these types of stories (admit it--you've always wanted to know precisely how sound travels from your stylus to your speakers) without lapsing into dry tech-talk, but Coleman manages to keep it breezy, at least in part by concentrating as much on the weirdo-inventors--and the public's (and industry's) reception to their patents--as he does on the technology itself. (Great stuff, for instance, about Les Paul.) He's clearly also a devotee of pop music who can discuss hip-hop without making an ass of himself, which is probably worth noting in a book that devotes a lot of space to the history of turntablism ("Ed-Ed-Edison's in the house, y'all"). On the other hand, I found myself wanting more than just the smooth overview--I wanted more connections drawn, more in the way of judgmental critiques (we know you think the industry in its present model is controlled by buffoons--say so!), some semblance of, you know, what it all means--or what he thinks it all means. Also, I get the feeling that Coleman wrote this book out of some deep-seated (and highly recognizable--to me anyway) need to understand what he refers to in his introduction as an "alien landscape," i.e., new music technology. I would've liked to find out more about why he was so driven to find out; that is to say, more about Mark Coleman.

Meantime, I'm highly intrigued by what sounds like a much more personal journey through vaguely similar subject matter: Geoffrey O'Brien's Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life, approvingly reviewed here and here. I like this passage quoted by Greg Bottoms in Bookforum: "[Music]'s as much of a past as I have, except of course that I don't have it. I make it up by imagining connections between fragments...The inhabitants of that world [the past] have become figures in the dream of the past that in weak moments I might mistake for History... You can...lose yourself in sounds captured in 1933, 1934, 1935. Stretch just those three years to a lifetime if you like. You won't find your lost family there but you'll find something connected to it, a space you can share with ghosts."

(Speaking of aural ghosts, I'm reminded of my second favourite "jukebox" record of all time--after "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," of course: "Jukebox, Help Me Find My Baby," a nervous little rockabilly ditty I once taped from a Sun Records compilation off my brother. I'm pretty sure it's the one by the Rhythm Rockers listed here, but I've been thus far shut out in my attempts to find it on a download. So much for the collapse of hardware, history, etc., eh?)

THIS MORNING'S (TYPICALLY BLANDLY EXPRESSED) FUNNY

"Let's understand something--the Canadian music industry is the second most important music industry in the world."

Prime Minister Paul Martin, quoted here via Aaron Wherry's blog.

MONEY QUOTE

"I certainly make no apologies for my organization being the first bank in North America to offer customers a stand-alone, full-service e-banking option. It was called mbanx, and we launched it in 1996 with lots of ballyhoo--as well as a bit of controversy regarding the slogan and theme song: Bob Dylan’s 'The times, they are a-changin'.'

"As it turned out, the times had not changed as much as we’d hoped and calculated when we experimented with mbanx. What we anticipated was a sizable demographic of technology-savvy young people entering the economy with a predisposition toward doing their banking in cyberspace."

From "Back to the Future": A CEO's Perspective on the IT Post-Revolution
By Tony Comper, Chairman and CEO, BMO Financial Group, at IBM's Global Financial Services Forum

HOLIDAY IN MANCHURIA

Scouring the web for conspiro-
movie-related stuff and came
across this! With Denzel Wash-
ington, Jon Voight, Meryl Streep
(in the hardest-to-surpass per-
formance, perhaps), and directed
by Jonathan Demme, who, along
with being a fine director in his
own right, is probably the
bravestkindestwarmestmostwonderfulhumanbeingI'veneverknown.

INTERVIEW

With critic Francis Davis. By Beppe Colli in Clouds and Clocks.

A TALE OF TWO KURTS

Voice of a generation and all that (hint: read sentence number two).

EARLY THOUGHTS ON HOBERMAN'S THE DREAM LIFE    [Disclaimer: Not Finished Reading Book]

I haven't read a lot of J. Hoberman's movie criticism over the years and I don't currently own any of his books, but as soon as I can afford the cover price I intend to pick up a copy of The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties. (Luckily, I was able to secure a copy from the Toronto Public Library. I was second in line for it, and I imagine there are many more people waiting behind me--or maybe this is just my imagination run amok. In my dream life, it's only a matter of weeks before everyone is talking and arguing about this book around water coolers and in variety stores across North America. Sigh.) It's a brilliant history, though I have to qualify that statement by mentioning that I'm not yet half way through it (subway reading is for the birds). Still, it already feels like the sort of movie book that will join The American Cinema, Stanley Kauffmann's seventies collections, and pretty much every Kael volume (except the two later ones I still don't own) as one of those essential critical maps I will pull off my shelf for many years to come, either to peruse favourite sections when I'm depressed or to find out immediately--work can wait, damnit!--what Hoberman has to say about some director or movie which just happens to have crossed my mind.

I'm not aware of another movie book that mixes politics and entertainment in such explicit terms yet in such a seamless way; the more you read, the more you realize that once upon a time (how to avoid saying this without lapsing into despicable Rolling Stone-style nostalgia?) these worlds really were inseparable. So while I'm learning plenty about movies--many of which I haven't seen, some of which I hadn't even heard of--as I read The Dream Life, I'm learning even more about American politics. Goldwater comes into clear view to me for the first time here--he was previously just some fanatic who ran against some wingut named Johnson--and the stuff about Kennedy is completely engrossing. I didn't realize there was such collusion going on there--between Kennedy and Hollywood, I mean, beyond the obvious Marilyn connection (though Hoberman can't provide a definitive answer to the burning question: did Kennedy see The Manchurian Candidate?).

Occasionally, the book connects its dots in a way that will probably strike some as a bit specious, if not altogether laboured. I can't pull a specific example out of the hat right now, but there are a lot of transitions on the order of two-days-after-Johnson-gave-a-speech-such-and-such-a-movie-premiered-to-a-dismal-box-office-return. But even when the connections don't add up in an immediately obvious or striking way, the parallels are usually at least fun to note. It's almost like Hoberman wrote the book with a stack of Varietys on one side of his desk, and stacks of Time and Newsweek on the other and then proceeded to make critical sense out of a mind-boggling mess of calendar dates and facts. I'm not equating his prose with dry wire clippings from Time and Variety, by the way--hardly--merely acknowledging the startling walk (or rather, slow pan) through history this book really is. In formal terms, the writing is both lucid and kaleidoscopic; if it's really "McLuhanesque" as someone else has said, it's only so in its breadth. His writing is not impenetrable.

I'm drowning here in superlatives and I still have some 250 pages to go, so I'll quit while I'm ahead. I assume everyone else is still reading it too, as I've yet to see one really substantial review. I was, however, alerted to the book in the first place through this interesting Slate conversation between David Edelstein and A.O. Scott. And on a sideline note, there's also what looks to be a worthwhile interview with Hoberman from 2001 by Steve Erickson (in Senses of Cinema). And if you don't like that...

LINKS PAGE...

Has been updated. Two more blog additions and one new 'zine (Global Pop Conspiracy).

WEEKEND RESOLUTIONS